As winter approaches I plan more writing about 'global warming' or 'climate change'. Winter is the perfect time to focus on this topic because daily life becomes filled with first hand evidence of exactly how heat behaves in the atmosphere. Just so there is no mistake, I believe the environmental movement and a gullible media are complicit in marketing a fictional horror story for purely for political reasons.
The Republican controlled Federal Government is beginning to take a serious look at 'The Role of Science in Environmental Policy'. Testimony to the US Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works covers two crucial points and the full text all statements are available from the 9/28/05 Hearing.
Michael Crichton MD: What I would like to emphasize to the committee today is the importance of independent verification to science. In essence, science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid—and will be universally accepted—only if it can be reproduced by others, and thereby independently verified. The impersonal rigor of the method has produced enormously powerful results for 400 years.Knowledge becomes scientific fact only when anyone else can independently reproduce real world results. In other words, doing a single study is not sufficient to establish results as fact. To the contrary, any study should be considered false until such time as someone else independently achieves the same results. This defining characteristic of the Scientific Method is the point almost always missed by an unquestioning media.
The scientific method is utterly apolitical. A truth in science is verifiable whether you are black or white, male or female, old or young. It’s verifiable whether you know the experimenter, or whether you don’t. It’s verifiable whether you like the results of a study, or you don’t. … Thus, when adhered to, the scientific method can transcend politics. Unfortunately, the converse may also be true: when politics takes precedent over content, it is often because the primacy of independent verification has been abandoned.
The second essential concept to understand is that computer modeling is not science. Computers have become indispensable for analyzing real world data and for generating theory for real world experimental testing, but computer created data are not part of the scientific method, and any conclusions from that data are not scientific.
Dr. William Gray: Over the last 20 years, I have been dismayed over the bogus science and media-hype associated with the nuclear winter and the human-induced global warming hypotheses. … The potential for climate modeling mischief and false scares from incorrect climate model scenarios is enormous. Numerical modeling output gives an air of authenticity which is not warranted by the input physics and long periods of integration. How many more climate scares are we to see from climate models which are not able to realistically predict past and future climate changes let alone future decadal or century changes?Proponents of theories that human activity endangers this planet toss the term science around as if the word itself imparts validity to a claim. Any claim that depends on uncritical acceptance of a single measurement or is supported by data from a software program is not scientific knowledge. It is time the scientific community begins asserting this truth to the politicians and the media and the public.
